By Blood Revealed
by pagerunner
Summary: After the explosion of Kirkwall's Chantry, two templars are sent to find the escaped mages from the fallen Circle. When one gets an unexpected glimpse into the past of one they were charged to find, she has to decide where her duty truly lies.


The dead girl had raven feathers in her hair.

Ser Aryn stood above the body, breath rasping, and stared at what she'd done. Another mage lay defeated. Weeks after the Circle's fall, she and her partner were still hunting escapees from Kirkwall, and this one had fallen to Aryn's blade - but not without leaving a too-familiar sign.

Raven feathers, defiantly dark against her red-gold hair.

Ser William ripped the tie out of the young woman's braid, jolting her head into an unnatural angle. "These Maker-forsaken mages," he spat. "Championing that bastard's cause after he… he…."

Aryn closed her eyes. Branded there was an image of the Chantry in ruins and the mage who'd done it, infamously dressed in dark, feathered robes. When she opened them again, the dead girl was still there, surrounded by trees flowering out of season under the bright sunlight. The contrast made Aryn's head ache.

Ser William clearly wanted to divorce himself from all of it. He slapped the girl's phylactery into Aryn's hand. "We need to go."

"But the body - we can't just leave her-"

"Do what you must," he snapped. "But hurry. We have to move on."

She nodded, but didn't point out the irony. After the chaos that had engulfed their lives, and for that matter the world, she suspected that moving on was the last thing either of them would be able to do.

William left her, not for the first time, and Aryn went to work.

The worst thing was, this mage hadn't truly fought back.

It was one thing to pursue avowed rebels, those the templars could link to known crimes. There was no guilt in dispatching those who turned to blood and demons; they'd already given up their humanity for power.

Mages like this one were harder.

The phylactery had driven Aryn and William to a town north of Kirkwall, where there were rumors of a mage being sheltered in exchange for small favors: healing and charms, ostensibly harmless things. But she'd turned enough opinion in favor of the mages that the templars had no choice but to confront her alone.

From the first smite, she clearly knew she had no chance. It didn't stop her from shouting defiance. She'd cried out for freedom and bared her throat to Aryn's sword, daring her to strike - to make her another martyr.

Aryn resisted. It was William, growing angrier with every word the young woman said, who ordered her execution.

He was taking this one harder than most. Aryn wondered what was actually wrong.

She waited out his reticence until nightfall. They both sat over their campfire a good distance from town: Aryn cleaning her blade, William turning those feathers over and over in his hands. Finally he threw them into the fire. "Damned renegades," he said. "Why did they have to do this?"

Aryn watched the feathers curl and singe, throwing off sparks. She could almost smell the wreckage of the Chantry in their smoke. More likely, though, it simply hadn't left her since the days of trying to recover what she could from the rubble. The dust and death and the bloody tang of magic had torn at the nerves of every templar there; some went nearly mad from the strain. Aryn and William were amongst those sent to get away from it, but she was beginning to wonder if their superiors had left it a little too late.

Aryn rubbed her forehead. It was getting hard to think. At least the next thing William asked was simpler.

"Do you still have her phylactery?" he said. Aryn produced the vial. With its purpose spent, the nagging glow had gone from it and the blood darkened and dried. It uncomfortably resembled what she'd cleaned from her sword. "Good. You take care of it. I need to sleep."

"I guess I get first watch, then?" Aryn said wryly. He'd already climbed into his bedroll and was muttering something indistinct. At the end of it, she heard, "Don't go far."

She murmured assent, and stepped outside the firelight.

What he'd asked for was a small thing, in theory. Templars had a brief ritual for the disposing of phylacteries; magic had made them, and magic had to be cleansed. So Aryn knelt and tried to center herself. All she had to do was expend a little energy to wipe away whatever lingered there.

Aryn took a deep breath of cold air. As she did, one last glint shimmered in the vial.

Later she'd blame that for distracting her. Or maybe it was the lyrium headache she'd been living with for days, or the weeks without proper sleep. But when she released her power, it came out too sharply and split the glass, letting the dust of the mage's life float free.

Aryn recoiled, coughing violently. It wasn't enough to repel the magic coiling into her thoughts. The phylactery was still pointing the way, she realized - showing one last glimpse of the mage it had been enchanted to find.

Except all that remained was a memory….

…_of the massive Gallows chamber, an unforgivingly hard chair, and the little girl dwarfed by it all. Two armored men stood too close, smelling of metal, sweat and something that made her nose itch and her head buzz. She couldn't get away, except by squeezing even tighter into a corner of the chair. It hurt. So did the rope that lashed her arms into place. They'd said if she were a good girl and stopped fighting, they wouldn't have to use the rope._

_After being hauled away for no crime greater than healing her father's broken leg, she didn't want to be a good girl anymore._

_"All mages under the Chantry's supervision," the tall, imposing templar said, "have a phylactery made so we can find you anywhere you go…."_

_"I want to go home," she cried. The other templar, slightly more sympathetic, bent down._

_"This is home now. You're here so you can learn to be safe. You weren't in control back there, and that's too dangerous."_

_She shuddered, not feeling dangerous at all. She was exhausted and confused, and something in the air here felt very, very wrong. Her arms strained uselessly at the rope._

_"Sit still," the younger man said, "or this will only hurt worse."_

_It was then that she saw the knife._

_She screamed, and something in her snapped. An instinctive wave of power flashed out; it wasn't strong enough to push the men away, but it startled them. Angered them._

_Then a much brighter light overwhelmed her._

_Her whole body jolted, caught on the anticipatory edge of pain. Then she slumped over. She felt sick, disoriented, like a vital spark deep inside her had been completely snuffed out._

_The angry templar gripped her chin with hard fingers._

_"That," he said, "is a smite. If you raise your power against us, that is what we will do. You will obey our rules and we are not to be questioned. You are ours now. Do you understand?"_

_"Ser Coram," the other said quietly. "She's just a girl."_

_"Just a vessel," he ground out. "Another potential abomination. Let's be done with this... the brat's wasting my time."_

_Coram thrust the empty vial and the knife at the other templar, who reluctantly gave in. "Sophia," he said, "please be still…."_

_The knife sliced across her hand._

_Perhaps it was a mercy she'd been drained first, because everything felt dizzily distant: the pain, the stickiness of the blood as it slid drop by drop into the vial, bits of her life and heart and memories staining the glass…._

_"More," said Coram, but Ser William - for to Aryn's spying eyes, it was unmistakably him - had already stoppered the vial._

_Coram took the phylactery and raised it high. Sophia saw her life held captive in his hands, and began to understand just what being a mage would mean…._

And Ser Aryn fell free of the memory.

She gasped hard, nearly collapsing. The intense dislocation of the vision had left her utterly shaken. Living through something that vivid, without warning...

"Sophia," she whispered. She hadn't even known the girl's name.

Then Aryn heard something, and startled upright. On the other side of the low-burning fire, William had moved. His eyes were fixed on her. When she croaked his name, he shook his head.

"We'll talk in the morning," he said.

With that he turned away, leaving Aryn alone with her bewildered thoughts until it was her turn to fall into uneasy sleep.

William was grumpy in the morning, but that was to be expected. Aryn usually kept quiet until they decamped, whereupon William, with a task at hand and a clear path, was more himself again.

But today he didn't even criticize when she fumbled their pack of food, dropping half its contents onto the ground. He just glowered. Aryn sorted it out and finally said, "Whatever you have to say to me, I wish you'd-"

"I remembered her," William interrupted. Aryn stopped. "I should have known Sophia would get tangled up in this. But I didn't ask whose phylactery it was. I didn't know until I saw her." He'd picked up a stick and was jabbing it into the mostly-dormant fire, for no apparent purpose except spite. Then he dropped it and said, "I'm sorry I made you do it."

"The... phylactery?"

"Killing her. I couldn't."

Aryn didn't know what to think. "We shouldn't have had to kill her at all," she said, and William made a face. "Capture _was_ an option."

"Was it?" He sounded bitter. "Where can we hold someone like her now? How can we contain this? Everywhere we go there's more rebellion..."

The raven feathers had long since burned to ash, but they both looked at the fire as if the shape would still be lingering there.

"He was a healer too, that mage who did all this," William said darkly. "We can't just... be _lenient."_

"Then why couldn't you finish it?"

He didn't answer. Instead he countered, "How much did you see?"

"Did you know that could happen? The memory?"

"If one _does_ it wrong, yes."

"And did you expect me to?"

Again, he didn't reply. Aryn grimaced. She had to offer something, but the shock of that vision was hard to describe. A small, strange part of her wanted to protect it. "I saw you make the phylactery." William waited, and so she added, inadequately, "She was crying."

"She fought us," he murmured. "Seven years old and she tried to fight back..."

"How could you expect her not to?"

"Don't _side_ with her!" William bellowed, startling her. "This is what they do, Aryn - what magic does... they get into your head, make you see things..."

"But it was true," she whispered.

William kicked the fire, sending ashes and embers scattering. Aryn jerked aside; he heaved in several ragged breaths, fighting for calm. Finally he spoke like it was an apology.

"I felt so sorry for her," he said. "I'd only been at the Gallows... two days? Maybe three. I knew my role, but..."

_But._ Yes, those first few days in the Circle were an uncomfortable revelation. Knowing the principle didn't mean you were prepared to deal with the people. "She wasn't what you expected, was she?"

"No," he murmured. "Not that scared little girl. And for a moment I had to wonder - _why are we doing this..." _ He laughed, without much humor. "Sometimes I think I was assigned to her as a test of my resolve. Now I've truly failed."

"That's not true…."

"Look at my hands," he said. Aryn did, seeing marks from years of work - and much fresher scars. "When the Chantry fell, I worked through that rubble until I'd worn through my gloves and I still didn't stop, because I knew I had to…find anyone who…" His voice cracked, and he stepped sideways from whatever he was remembering. "I knew who was right and wrong in that atrocity. But then I looked at Sophia and I still saw that scared little girl. Even though she was siding with _him."_ He turned haunted eyes on Aryn. "Don't let yourself feel for them, Aryn. It will rip your soul in two."

"But what's left of us if we _don't?"_

He bowed his head. "Hold to the reasons you became a templar. You chose this path for a purpose - something untouched by all this. Follow that. It's the best we can do."

With that he went to his packs, readying to leave. Aryn watched him pull something from the bag. It was a long, thin chain weighted down by another phylactery, gleaming red in a beam of light.

"All I wanted was to be something more than I was," he said distantly. "Something better. Defending my city and my family... it seemed a worthy cause." He sounded wistful. "Simple."

And it was, really. Except that it wasn't simple at all.

_This is a just cause,_ Sophia's voice echoed in memory. _Not acts of destruction, but rejecting this broken system that makes monsters of us all…._

"These mages think the same thing," Aryn said. William turned and looped the phylactery around his neck.

"I know," he told her, and said nothing more.

They had a long ride ahead of them.

Aryn found herself following William's advice, and trying to get to the heart of why she'd become a templar. Her results were decidedly mixed. She'd had such romantic ideas at the start, thoughts of nobility and tradition and valor, but….

She couldn't make it that straightforward anymore.

William was certainly trying to. He was coping, barely, by shutting out everything beyond his perceived duty. Even her. After the pain they'd had to face, she couldn't say she didn't understand, but she couldn't steel herself so, either. Not if it meant turning away from mercy.

She could still face down dark magic. She could stand for protecting the innocent from evil. But defining innocence itself… that was going to be harder. And people like Sophia deserved far more complex judgment than her blade alone.

Aryn set her jaw and rode up closer to her partner. Before she could reconsider where her thoughts were taking her, she held out her hand.

"I can carry that," she said.

He touched the phylactery. "Are you sure you know what you're-"

She thrust her hand closer. William sniffed, then conceded. He took the chain from around his neck and dropped the vial into her hand.

_Let Sophia be the last one who dies without cause,_ Aryn thought, against the phylactery's insistent pull. _And if that means disobeying orders, so be it. Even yours, my partner. I just hope you'll understand when the time comes._

"Maker guide us," she whispered. William echoed her.

And they rode on together to whatever awaited them, while a raven cried out high above, out of Aryn's grasp.


End file.
